AT&T announced only a few days ago that it was cutting the price of the HTC First phone with Facebook Home from $99 to $.99 with a new contract. At the same time the wireless carrier also announced that the off-contract price of the device would drop from $450 to $350. That move was apparently an attempt to clear stock as sources claim AT&T will discontinue the HTC First.

According to Boy Genius Report, sales of the HTC First are so abysmal that AT&T decided to cancel the phone not long after it launched. All unsold inventory left in AT&T stores around the country will reportedly be returned to HTC. BGR cites sources that claim AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 HTC First smartphones nationwide through last week even though the phone was priced at only $.99.

Facebook Home has received its share of criticism with many calling it a product needing some serious attention. Other reports indicate that sales staff at AT&T stores don't like Facebook Home or the HTC First and have made little effort to sell the handset to customers.

Currently, the biggest selling devices on the AT&T network -- by a large margin -- are the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

HTC has a contract with AT&T meaning that AT&T can't pull its in-store display for the First until the contract expires. It's unclear exactly when that promotion will end and when AT&T will pull the device off store shelves. The fact that HTC paid big money for advertising in AT&T stores in the device is still unable to sell says a lot about how consumers view HTC and Facebook Home.

The problem isn't so much the idea, it's the poor execution. The Android, Windows Phone, and iOS apps are all somewhat crippled in that it's hard to find regularly used features and the feeds don't prioritize you're best friends' updates correctly.

Facebook is pretty clueless when it comes to mobile dev... which is kind of baffling given the amount of money they have to throw at it.

Ultimately the point is that it's utterly unneeded. You can access FB on a browser...or you can use the existing FB apps.

There's no use case for doing anything more with it. This is nothing more than the thrashing of a company that has no idea how it's going to demonstrate continuing growth to it's investors...so it's throwing sh1t at the wall and hoping it sticks.

Oh, there was an article on arstechnica some time ago about Facebook and their Android app. It described how the open nature of Android has allowed Facebook's engineer to dig into some problem they had running on Gingerbread. Turned out there was a 5MB buffer for information about the functions in your program. In latter versions, this was enlarged, so their app was fine, but on Gingerbread it was acting up.Can you imagine running out of 5MB just for function metadata? For an app like Facebbok?

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer